Jorge Majfud, 08/06/2025
Translated by Tlaxcala
The August 13, 1945 issue of Time magazine quotes Truman: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare. .. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. [...] We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.... If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already aware.” [full statement here].
In London, Winston Churchill also
referred to these feats of science: “We must indeed pray that this
awe-striking technology will be made to accomplish peace among the nations, and
that instead of wreaking havoc upon the entire globe, it may lead to world
prosperity.”
On its August 20 cover, the same magazine greeted readers with a large red disc on a white background with an X crossing it out. It was not the first atomic bomb in history dropped on a population of human beings, but the sun or the flag of Japan. On page 29, in an article entitled “Awful Responsibility,” President Truman outlined what would later become the past. As a good man of faith whenever placed in power by God, Truman acknowledged: "We thank God that this has come upon us rather than upon our enemies. And we pray that He will guide us to use this in His way and for His purposes”.
In the semantic
inversion of subject and object, ‘this’ refers to the atomic bomb that ”has
come upon us“; ”our enemies“ obviously refers to Hitler and Hirohito; ”us"
refers to us, God’s protégés.
In reality, the barbarity of fire had begun much
earlier. General LeMay had been the mastermind who planned the bombing of
several Japanese cities, including Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama, and Kobe, between
February and May 1945, three months before the atomic bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the night of March 10, LeMay ordered 1,500 tons of explosives to be dropped on Tokyo from 300 B-29 bombers. 500,000 bombs rained down from 1:30 to 3:00 in the morning. 100,000 men, women, and children died in a few hours, and a million others were seriously injured. A precursor to napalm bombs, a gelatinous fire that stuck to houses and human flesh, was successfully tested. “Women ran with their babies like torches on their backs,” recalled Nihei, a survivor.
When the war was decided and over, a week after the
atomic bombs, hundreds of US planes dropped tens of thousands of bombs on
different cities in Japan, leaving another trail of thousands of victims ready
to be forgotten.
General Carl Spaatz, euphoric, proposed dropping a
third atomic bomb on Tokyo. The proposal did not go ahead because Tokyo had
already been reduced to rubble long ago and only remained on the maps as an
important city. Imperial Japan had also killed tens of thousands of Chinese in
air raids, but it was not the Chinese who mattered at the time.
In fact, they never mattered and were even banned from
entering the US by the 1882 law. The same General Curtis LeMay would repeat
this strategy of indiscriminate massacre at a convenient distance on North
Korea and Vietnam, leaving millions of civilians dead as if they were ants. All
for a good cause (freedom, democracy, and human rights).
Shortly after the countless bombings of innocent and defenceless
civilians, the heroic General LeMay would admit: “If we had lost the war, I
would have been convicted as a war criminal.” On the contrary, like King
Leopold II of Belgium and other Hitler Nazis promoted to high positions in
NATO, LeMay was also decorated multiple times for his services to civilization,
including the Légion d’honneur, awarded by France.
Nothing new. The narrative of events is not
just for domestic consumption. It is exported. In the port of Shimoda, a bust
of Commodore Matthew Perry commemorates and will continue to commemorate, for
centuries to come, the place and date when the USAmerican captain liberated
Japan’s trade in the 19th century by force of cannon and made possible the
will of the god of those very particular Christians. A century later, in 1964,
the same Japanese government awarded the Order of the Rising Sun to General
Curtis LeMay for his services to civilization. What was his contribution?
General LeMay innovated military tactics during World War II by
indiscriminately bombing half a dozen large Japanese cities in 1945. Months
before the famous atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 100,000
civilians died in Tokyo in a single night under a rain of other American bombs.
LeMay acknowledged: “I don’t mind killing Japanese.”
Of course, not everything went his way. Years later,
he recommended to the young and inexperienced President Kennedy that he drop a
few atomic bombs on Havana as a way to prevent a greater evil. Kennedy
disagreed. A couple of decades later, in one of the first conversations on the
subject of Cuba, Alexander Haig, the new Secretary of State, told President
Ronald Reagan: “Just give me the order and I’ll turn that shitty island into an
empty parking lot.”
In 1968, General Curtis LeMay was the
vice-presidential candidate for the racist and segregationist Independent Party
of the United States. For a third party, it received a respectable 13.5 percent
of the vote. In 2024, it could easily have won within the Democratic-Republican
Party.
After the greatest act of terrorism in history, the
governments of Japan will not spare any apologies for the crime of having been
bombed in every possible way and without mercy.
